JELD-WEN Holding Inc
NYSE:JELD
Earnings Call Analysis
Q4-2023 Analysis
JELD-WEN Holding Inc
In the highly competitive and fluid North American market, the company faced a sales decrease of 13%, down to $748 million, spotlighting the broader challenges in the industry. Despite this, there has been a silver lining as the company successfully enhanced its adjusted EBITDA by 8% to $94 million. Additionally, the operational focus on cost management and price strategies led to margin expansion, evidenced by a 250-basis-point improvement to 12.6%. This indicates a resilient operational capability to preserve profitability amidst revenue contraction.
Europe continues to grapple with economic and geopolitical headwinds, resulting in a pronounced 18% revenue reduction down to $273 million with a consequential 20% dip in volume/mix. More pressing was a $6 million shrinkage in adjusted EBITDA, eroding margins by 110 basis points, underscoring the region's challenging environment. The company confronts an ongoing weakness in European demand that is expected to further depress volumes in the high single digits.
Looking ahead to 2024, the forecast reveals nuanced expectations for North America. The company predicts volumes will dip slightly, in the low single digits, with new single-family home construction anticipated to remain largely flat or experience a minor uptick. In contrast, the repair and remodel (R&R) sector remains shrouded in uncertainty, with projections leaning towards a low to mid-single digit downturn. This portrays a market bracing for continual moderation in activity, with select housing segments performing relatively better than others.
From a financial perspective, the company prepares for a potential contraction or flattening in core revenues, setting a broad revenue target range of $4.0 billion to $4.3 billion for 2024. The adjusted EBITDA projection hovers between $370 million to $420 million, despite anticipated volume softness, signifying strategic emphasis on bolstering productivity to outpace any adverse volume effects. Cost savings initiatives, expected to yield approximately $100 million, correlate with an anticipated margin enhancement, moving from 8.8% to around 9.5%, reflecting a robust 70 basis points uplift.
The company's financial direction steers towards maintaining a stable operating cash flow in alignment with 2023 figures while earmarking around $100 million for transformative initiatives, marking a decisive step for future growth and efficiency. This deliberate reinvestment foreshadows the company's willingness to bolster its foundation even if it means tempering its free cash flow expectations, which are set to land between $50 million and $100 million for the year. The goal is clear: invest now for a more resilient and profitable future.
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Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the JELD-WEN Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2023 Results Call. I would now like to welcome James Armstrong, Vice President, Investor Relations, to begin the call. James, over to you.
Thank you, and good morning. We issued our fourth quarter and full year 2023 earnings release last night and posted a slide presentation to the Investor Relations portion of our website, which can be found at investor.jeld-wen.com. We will be referencing this presentation during our call. Today, I'm joined by Bill Christensen, Chief Executive Officer; and Julie Albrecht, Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn it over to Bill, I would like to remind everyone that during this call, we will make certain statements that constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, including those set forth in our earnings release and provided in our Forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC. JELD-WEN does not undertake any duty to update forward-looking statements, including the guidance that we're providing with respect to certain expectations for future results. Additionally, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures, which we believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation, or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to their most directly comparable financial measures calculated under GAAP can be found in our earnings release and in the appendix of our earnings presentation. With that, I'd like to now turn the call over to Bill.
Thank you, James, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call today. I'm pleased to report that our fourth quarter earnings were better than we expected, and we're making great progress on strengthening the foundation of JELD-WEN. I want to thank all of our employees for their continued dedication as we work together to plan and execute our performance improvement activities. Today, I'll start by giving a brief overview of fourth quarter results, and discuss some of the actions we've taken to improve our financial performance. I'll then introduce several of our new leaders before handing over to Julie to discuss the financial results in more detail. I'll then return to discuss our transformation journey, before providing 2024 financial guidance and taking your questions. I'll begin with our fourth quarter highlights on Slide 4. While sales were in line with our expectations, earnings were above the top end of our guidance, primarily due to solid execution of our ongoing productivity actions. As a result, margins significantly improved year-over-year. We continue to generate strong cash flows, driven by improved earnings and reduced working capital balances. Lastly, I'm pleased to report that we achieved our 2023 cost savings goals as we continue to remove fixed costs, including site closures and implement additional performance improvements across the business. At the beginning of 2023, we committed to improving our business. And as I look back at what our team accomplished last year, I'm proud of what we achieved. On Slide 5, you see some of the important actions that are driving our improved results. We're focused on streamlining our business and took important steps in 2023, such as initiating our transformation journey as well as selling the Australasia business. Next, we prioritize strengthening our balance sheet, and using the Australasia divestiture proceeds, we repaid $450 million of long-term debt. We also made significant working capital reductions that were an important part of our strong cash flow generation. All of this delivered a net leverage of 2.5x, down from 3.6x at the prior year-end. Finally, we have taken significant steps to reduce our cost base, including closing or announcing the closure of 5 sites. And as I mentioned earlier, we delivered our targeted $100 million of cost savings. As you can see, we take our commitment seriously, and we're delivering on what we said we would do. In the fourth quarter, we continued to strengthen our foundation, a key initial phase of our transformation journey. On Slide 6, we outlined some of the major actions in our key focus areas of people and performance. As part of our culture and capabilities work stream, we finalized the key leadership behaviors that we believe will support achieving our goals. We're starting a broad training program about these behaviors in the coming weeks, targeting 1,600 global leaders. Another important action was launching our change agent network. This network consists of approximately 300 associates within the organization who are both trusted and recognized by their peers as leaders at all levels. The change agent network will allow us to more effectively share information, gather insights and provide support for the many projects we have underway. Switching to performance, we completed an extensive bottom-up planning process that engage thousands of our associates to generate ideas, followed by a business case and a project plan for each initiative. We have now sequenced these initiatives and are using a disciplined approach to track our implementation progress. Our expectation is that these projects will lead to significant long-term profitability improvements. Finally, we announced or completed the closure of 4 facilities in North America and Europe. Combined, these closures are expected to drive more than $13 million of annual EBITDA improvement that will phase in over the next 12 months. As part of our transformation journey, it is important that we have the right people to execute the significant changes we're planning. As you see on Slide 7, and as announced on February 7, we recently added several new executives to our senior leadership team. First, Gustavo Vianna was appointed as EVP and President of Europe. He brings over 3 decades of experience from various multinational companies. His experience includes operational and commercial transformations as well as promoting cultural change. Second, Dan Valenti was appointed as EVP North America Doors & Distribution. Dan joined us from Whirlpool Corporation, where he spent nearly 13 years in leadership roles, most recently as SVP and General Manager of KitchenAid Small Appliances. Dan possesses significant commercial, product development and supply chain experience. His expertise in understanding market dynamics, identifying growth opportunities and making informed strategic decisions will be extremely valuable to our team. Finally, Matt Meier has joined us as EVP, Chief Digital & Information Officer. Matt has helped multiple companies advance their digital transformations. His most recent position was EVP, Chief Digital and Data Officer at Driven Brand Holdings, where he was responsible for data technology outcomes for the largest automotive aftermarket services provider in North America. We're confident that these new leaders will be important catalysts in helping us achieve our goals, and I look forward to their insights and expertise. I'll now turn it over to Julie to discuss the financial results.
Thanks, Bill. Looking at Slide 9. Our fourth quarter revenues were approximately $1 billion, down 13% from the prior year. This decrease was driven by a reduction in our core revenues due to market-driven volume declines in both North America and Europe. Despite the lower sales, our adjusted EBITDA was $87 million in the fourth quarter, up 11% year-over-year leading to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 8.5%. This strong year-over-year margin improvement of 190 basis points reflects solid execution of our productivity actions in areas such as site closures, headcount reductions, freight management and sourcing optimization. On Slide 10, you see that our full year 2023 results tell a similar story as the fourth quarter. Our full year revenue was $4.3 billion, down 5% year-over-year. This decrease was driven by our core revenues as volume/mix was lower by 10%, with a partial offset from 5% of higher price realization. Our full year 2023 adjusted EBITDA increased by 9% to $380 million and margins expanded by 110 basis points to 8.8%. Our full year EBITDA growth was driven by operating cost reductions and positive price/cost results that were partially offset by the impact from lower volumes. As Bill mentioned earlier, in 2023, we significantly increased our cash flow and reduced our leverage. Turning to Slide 11, you see that we generated $345 million of operating cash flow, a $315 million improvement year-over-year as we had strong operational performance and significantly reduced our working capital balances. We also substantially improved our balance sheet. Using proceeds from the sale of the Australasia business and our strong cash flow, we reduced our net leverage ratio by more than a full turn to 2.5x at the end of 2023. Our leverage is now within our midterm target range of 2.0 to 2.5x. As you can see on Slide 12, our fourth quarter revenue decline was driven by lower volume/mix of 16%, which was slightly offset by 1% of price realization and a 1% positive foreign exchange translation impact. I'll provide additional comments about our North America and Europe volume trends shortly. Additionally, you'll find a revenue walk, including segment details for the fourth quarter and the full year in the appendix of our earnings presentation. On Slide 13, you see that our adjusted EBITDA increased by $9 million year-over-year. Despite significant volume/mix headwinds, we generated solid profit contributions from improved productivity, lower SG&A expenses and favorable price/cost. Regarding price/cost, we remain focused on pricing discipline, as we do continue to see inflation in costs such as labor and insurance. Moving to our segment results on Slide 14. In the fourth quarter, our North America segment generated $748 million in sales, which was a decline of 13% from year ago levels. This was driven by a core revenue decline of 13% due to lower volume/mix of 14%. However, North America's adjusted EBITDA improved to $94 million, which was up 8% year-over-year, while margins improved by 250 basis points to 12.6%. This was due to positive price relative to inflation and strong productivity, which more than offset the negative impact of lower volume/mix. In Europe, we generated $273 million in revenue and $16 million in adjusted EBITDA. Core revenues decreased by 18% in the fourth quarter, driven by lower volume/mix of 20%. Adjusted EBITDA declined by $6 million from last year, leading to 110 basis points of lower margin. This decline was due to continued weak demand that was partially offset by improved productivity. Now turning to the market outlook on Slide 15, and starting with North America. We expect North America volumes to be down by low single digits in 2024. We anticipate that new single-family home construction will be flat to up slightly during the year. However, the outlook for repair and remodel activity remains uncertain, and we currently expect R&R activity to be down by low to mid-single digits. In the U.S., high interest rates continue to weigh on consumer confidence and create an affordability challenge. Existing home sales remain at relatively low levels, as people with low interest rate mortgages are reluctant to move. However, this dynamic creates an opportunity for increased new housing starts. The European market is expected to continue experiencing demand weakness due to the ongoing macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges. Overall, we anticipate volumes in the region to be down by high single digits. Residential construction markets remained soft across Europe, and we anticipate that these volumes will be down by high single digits. Additionally, commercial project volumes are slowing in Europe, and this demand is expected to decline by mid-single digits. I'll now turn it back to Bill to talk about our transformation journey.
Thanks, Julie. As I've shared in previous earnings calls, we're taking a two-pronged approach to improve our business. As we show on Slide 17, in the short term, we're focusing on strengthening the foundation of our business. Our solid 2023 results underscore the significant progress we're making on reducing our operating costs and improving our operational performance. However, our margins are still not where they should be, and we have a lot more work to do. We remain committed to building a strong foundation that supports our future growth. In addition to the short-term focus, we continue to assess opportunities to grow our business, and we commit to only invest where we have the right to win. While this process is ongoing, we see a lot of opportunity for profitable growth in the years to come. Turning to Slide 18, as I've shared before, my 3 focus areas are people, performance and strategy, and our transformation journey is currently focused on people and performance. We're engaging thousands of associates around the world in activities to positively impact both culture and financial results. Our teams have identified, validated and now sequenced more than 800 initiatives. Related to our culture, we're working to more clearly connect our values to our everyday work. This includes investing more in training about important behaviors, including safety, continuous improvement and accountability. We're then measuring our progress and getting feedback from our teams. I'll talk more about our organizational health activities on the next slides. Shifting to performance. Our numerous initiatives include a balanced focus on both growth and cost reduction actions. We're working to improve our team strength, processes and tools within our various commercial activities. In addition, we continue to rightsize our manufacturing network as well as invest in automation, and utilize our scale to streamline sourcing among many other smaller initiatives across the organization. We're investing more on ourselves as we execute on our solid pipeline of high ROIC projects to deliver improved profitability this year and in the future. To give you a better understanding of the type of work we're doing, I want to walk through a few examples of specific projects. Slide 19 outlines our focus areas aimed at fostering a more agile culture. After assessing our organizational health index in the first half of 2023, we have honed in on 3 key areas: communication, training and incentives. In our global organization, ensuring that important information reaches the right individuals in a timely manner presents a significant challenge. Nevertheless, we're committed to fostering transparent communication at all levels, employing both formal and informal channels. One method we're employing to improve communication is utilizing our recently launched change agent network. This network comprises approximately 300 individuals within the organization who are empowered to accelerate communication in support of our cultural transformation. We're also investing in employee development through a variety of training initiatives. These programs cover our leadership, change management and technical skills. While some of these trainings take place in formal classroom settings, we're also leveraging on-the-job mentorship for more effective learning experiences. Finally, we're realigning rewards and recognition across the organization to improve connectivity with both financial performance and targeted behaviors. Simultaneously, we're decentralizing responsibility, while improving accountability within the organization. Now shifting to performance on Slide 20, we show one of the growth-oriented projects we have underway in Europe. An opportunity that we have identified is improving efficiency in our quoting process. Our European team is developing a next-generation CPQ, or Configure, Price and Quote system, that will allow customers to configure their own orders and identify the right JELD-WEN products that fit their needs. The system will then accurately price and provide detailed quotes to customers. When this project is complete, we will improve our customer service, refine our profit visibility and integrate quotes with our manufacturing systems. To execute this project, we expect to spend approximately $2.5 million in both expense and capital, but anticipate a cumulative EBITDA impact of more than $15 million over the next 5 years and an IRR of more than 50%. Moving to Slide 21. I want to highlight an initiative that is a first in a series of investments to increase automation in our North America Door Facilities. By leveraging proven technology, this project will drive operational efficiencies on our production line and elevate our product quality. Furthermore, the project will address bottlenecks in our facility, resulting in a substantial reduction in the build cycle duration. This initiative is expected to generate more than $6 million in EBITDA a year once fully ramped up, with an IRR of more than 45%. Once this work is complete, it will also lead to further opportunities to reduce our network complexity and improve cost to serve. These 2 performance-related projects are just examples of the over 800 large and small projects that came from our bottoms-up planning process. We expect these projects will lead to a much stronger JELD-WEN, with a solid foundation and significantly improved profitability. I now want to discuss our 2024 guidance. On Slide 23, you see our initial guidance for revenue and adjusted EBITDA. We expect our 2024 revenue to be between $4.0 billion and $4.3 billion as our core revenues are expected to be flat to down 7% compared to 2023. This is driven by the continuing market uncertainty in both North America and Europe as Julie mentioned earlier in her comments. We anticipate that our adjusted EBITDA will fall within the range of $370 million to $420 million, driven potentially by lower volumes, which we expect to be more than offset by ongoing productivity improvements. We expect cost savings of approximately $100 million, which is a combination of approximately $50 million of carryforward benefits from last year's actions and new initiatives that will be delivered this year. At the midpoint of our guidance, our margins are improving from 8.8% last year to 9.5%, a solid 70 basis points. As we look at the phasing of earnings this year, we expect our first quarter EBITDA to be slightly lower than the same period in 2023 due to anticipated volume headwinds and lower backlogs than we had when we entered last year. However, we expect benefits from our internal investments to ramp up throughout the year, and therefore, expect approximately 40% of EBITDA in the first half of the year and the remainder in the second half. I'd now like to provide some information about our cash flow outlook for 2024, which is outlined on Slide 24. We expect that this year's operating cash flow will be similar to 2023, before we invest approximately $100 million of nonrepeating cash expenses to fund portions of our transformation journey. In addition to these investments in JELD-WEN's future, we plan to increase our capital expenditures to approximately 4% of sales to drive costs out of the business and set ourselves up for future growth. As you can see from the examples of projects that I discussed earlier, we're keenly focused on delivering returns significantly above our cost of capital. All in, we expect our free cash flow to be approximately $50 million to $100 million this year, which reflects both our strong commitment to investing in JELD-WEN's future, and our ability to self-fund these investments with planned operating cash flows. As I wrap up, let's turn to Slide 25. I'm excited to continue updating you on our transformation journey as this year progresses. As I mentioned earlier, we take our commitment seriously, and we're executing on what we have said we will do. We know that by fixing our foundation, we're preparing for profitable growth when the market improves. I'm confident that over the next few years, JELD-WEN will deliver significantly improved profitability and return on invested capital. We appreciate your continued interest, and I'll now turn it over to James to move to Q&A.
Thanks, Bill. Operator, we're now ready to begin Q&A.
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Phil Ng with Jefferies.
Congrats on a really strong quarter. And Bill, I really appreciate the color you shared with us today in terms of the transformation journey. It sounds really exciting.
Thanks, Phil.
Is there a way to help us kind of think about the productivity savings in the next few years? I appreciate some of these investments you're making and just these training efforts and decentralizing the process is going to take some time to take flight. But help us think through how that perhaps progress, whether it's productivity in the next few years, the growth profile or maybe even aspirationally what's a target you aspire to deliver from an EBITDA margin standpoint in a more normalized growth environment?
Yes. So Phil, thank you for the question. As we look at our transformation, and as I shared in my prepared remarks, we have a significant pipeline of projects, so over 800 that we're currently working through, and we've sequenced these, obviously, over the next number of years. And there's projects that are dropping in '24, we expect that's going to deliver probably $50 million to the bottom line. There's other projects: one, which we talked about automation in some of our door facilities where we're in the pipeline and ordering the equipment, but that will be installed late in the year. So that will clearly have than an impact in '25 and out years. So it's too early for us to commit to what we see that we're going to deliver in '25. We'll clearly have strong line of sight as we get into the back half of this year. But our expectation is that the project pipeline, based on what we see today, will be ramping up in the out years, but too early to calibrate. Our message this year, Phil, is we want to overcompensate the market headwinds with our internal actions as we did last year, and I think we did well. So we're expecting to deliver more benefit than what we're going to lose in sales headwind, but we're expecting a significant pipeline ramp up as we roll into the back end of the year, and we'll be sharing that as we get into, let's say, Q3, Q4 results.
Okay. That's helpful. And then when you think about 2024, perhaps maybe a question for Julie, great to hear that you're expecting price/cost to be largely neutral. Can you give us some color on what you're seeing out there from a pricing standpoint? There's been a lot of chatter about the retail channel, pressing their suppliers a little more aggressively on pricing concession. So help us -- give us a little context in terms of where you're in terms of negotiations with the retail channel, if there's any line of reviews that we should be mindful of? And then the price/cost component, what's price, what's cost, what's baked into your outlook for this year?
Yes. So maybe I can start at a high level, Phil, and then Julie maybe can augment with some details. So our aspiration this year is definitely to be neutral from a price cost standpoint. I would say, at the end of last year, we finally had caught up. As you well know, we were lagging for a while on price and so we do feel that we've caught up. We still see cost inflation coming at us even with the down volume. There's labor inflation, there's benefit inflation, there's glass inflation. So there are some key input costs that are increasing. We're doing our best to offset that. And clearly, the aspiration is neutral this year in a pretty demanding potentially down volume market. Negotiations are ongoing. Some are already complete. So it's I'd say too early to draw final conclusions about where things land, but our teams are doing their work, and we feel comfortable currently giving the guidance that we want to be price/cost neutral.
Yes. Maybe I'll just add a little bit to that. I think top line impact from prices, again, we'd say very neutral, maybe very low single-digit type of price increase just to focus on the inflation that Bill just mentioned. Specific to labor, we really are looking at similar inflationary impacts this year in '24 that we saw last year. So call it, kind of 4% to 5% labor increases between North America and Europe as well. Otherwise, I mean, inflation is moderating. But as we all know, there is still inflation in certain aspects of our materials. And again, as we've already mentioned today, definitely labor and related benefits, insurance is definitely, really no slowdown there in what we're experiencing.
Our next question comes from the line of Susan Maklari with Goldman Sachs.
The first question I want to focus a bit on is your expectation for North America volumes to potentially be down somewhere in that low single-digit range. As we think about that coming through, how do you think of the cadence through the year perhaps? And then any thoughts on the upside from there as we do start to see some of that single-family starts or activity coming through?
Yes. So thanks for the question, Susan. Here's, from a high level, how we're looking at the year currently, and then I'll talk maybe at the end about how we're looking at 1H versus 2H potentially. So if we break down North America, we got 3 buckets that are relevant, 2 are very relevant. So new construction, single-family, that's about 50% of the sales in North America. We're seeing it's flat to slightly up in '24. R&R, which is close to 50% of our sales is down low to mid-single. And we do have a small bucket of nonresidential or commercial, which is our multifamily business, VPI. That's a very small share, and we're growing well. We expect that market is going to be down double digits. We see ourselves only down high single because we're gaining share. But again, that's not a material mover for us. We're talking about less than 5% of total sales. So really new resi down -- or new resi up, flat to slightly up. And then on the repair and remodel, down low to mid-single. I'd say that there's definitely a view in the market talking to our customers, retail partners that if someone had to pick a half, it would definitely be H2 with a little bit of potential upside as we look at macro headwinds potentially residing as we move into the back half of the year. With interest rates easing and mortgages becoming a little more attractive, that could do a couple of things. Number one, get some more people into the resale market and that could trigger some potential R&R upside. But still, current view today is we're not planning on that upside. You can see the high end of our guidance, top line is to be flat year-over-year. And that would actually imply slight growth in the U.S. and Europe definitely being down. And that would be I think what we're thinking is an optimistic case, given current view. So that's kind of where we're. Julie can give a little more balance on what the sales is going to look like H1, H2.
Yes. Sure, Bill. Susan. I guess when we look at the phasing of sales through the year, we do see, at the midpoint of our guidance, 1 half a little bit weaker than 2 half. So maybe slightly off center of 50-50 there, just 1 half being a little bit lower. That means that really looking at first half of this year versus first half of '23, that's about a 10% decline in our sales, which is split pretty balanced between North America and Europe. So we do see -- when you look at the comps of again, first half this year versus first half second year -- first half last year, a little bit of weakness there. As Bill has already mentioned, our first quarter of '23 was a little bit stronger than we had expected and was stronger than kind of normal seasonality for Q1 because of that backlog we were bringing into last year. So that does create a more difficult comp specific to Q1. The other thing I'll go ahead and just mention about first half of this year versus last year and then looking at second half is really margins in the first half of this year we see being relatively flat year-over-year. So despite the lower sales, again, of maybe 10% or so, we do expect to maintain margins at around what was -- around 8.5% or so in the first half. That means that a lot of the benefit from the productivity and a little bit of ramp-up in sales really does help our margins expand in second half of the year.
Okay. That's very helpful color. And maybe building on that a bit, from the commentary, it does sound like those productivity initiatives really have gained some momentum in the last quarters or so. As you think about coming into the year with those tailwinds there and the potential for that second half lift, any thoughts on what an improvement in the volumes could mean in terms of some of these initiatives and the way that they could be realized? And just broadly speaking, what they could mean for the business and results?
Yes. So I mean if we think about what we're trying to do now, Susan, with getting our foundation in order, clearly, it's to create pretty significant operating leverage as the volume bounces back. And the volume will bounce back. Clearly, the U.S. is underbuilt. There's a pent-up demand. We know -- kind of we know what the macro upside is, but this is actually a great opportunity for us to be doing a lot of the homework that we need to get done. And again, the over 800 work streams that we currently have running are balanced over the next 3 years. And we're going to see a pretty significant exit run rate ramp up as we move into the end of this year. And so we're expecting that a volume uptick will be clearly good news for us, but that's not controlling what we see in '24. We're doing our homework, and we're planning on delivering those results to outpace the market headwind. If things change, and surprise everyone in a positive manner, clearly, our upside will be more significant. I think we've told you in the past, we see 25% to 30% operating leverage on the uptake. And we've done a good job in the last, I'd say, 12 months of really dialing in our capacity and making sure that our supply chains and our cost to serve are well balanced for the future. So we feel that we're in pretty good shape, and still doing a lot of the homework that we need to do because our margins, as I said in my prepared remarks, are still a long way away from where we need to be.
Our next question comes from the line of John Lovallo with UBS.
The first one is within that 15% decline in core revenue on a consolidated basis in the fourth quarter, is there any way to parse out the impact of the lower volume versus the negative mix, perhaps on a consolidated basis and maybe even North America versus Europe, if possible?
Yes. So I would say -- so a couple of maybe high-level comments, John, and then maybe Julie can jump in with some detail. So clearly, the run rate, if you look at Q4, 14% volume mix down in North America, 20% in Europe, which -- I mean, those are pretty significant numbers. And the -- it's mainly volume. There was not a lot of price in Q4. So really volume was the key driver. And especially in North America, if you think about a lot of the large retail partners that are balancing their inventories going into their fiscal year-end, which is early this year, some of the tight inventories in the market and weren't being reloaded. And by the way, we're starting to see some rebalancing of inventories as people start to better position themselves for potential growth in the back half of this year. So some of the signals that we're seeing are, I'd say, better balancing of channel inventories, and that's why we feel that the run rates that we saw in Q4 are not going to pull through to Q1. We're expecting a better traction in Q1. Julie can share some numbers and some detail that may help underscore that.
Yes, just a little more color on the mix there. Really, in Europe, that was almost entirely volume. So there was really very little negative mix in that negative 20% of volume/mix. North America, gosh, I'd say that volume impact was probably more like 10%, 11% within that incremental 2%, 3% being negative mix. So again, still in North America, heavily weighted to lower volumes, but did have a little bit of negative mix in that region in the fourth quarter.
Okay. That's really helpful. And then just maybe moving forward, you gave us the expectation for low single-digit volume declines in North America and high single-digit volume declines in Europe. Are you expecting any meaningful mix impact in either region in 2024?
Yes. I would say no. I think it's going to track on kind of what we saw at the back half of last year. If you just think where is the market in general, I'd say we're mixing down because the new construction market is tilted towards starter homes and lower price point homes. What we see, especially in January and February, a lot of the projects in Canada, that we have, a lot of the projects on our VPI commercial side, also in Europe, which are typically better margin profile businesses are being pushed out based on financing constraints that the projects have. So people are still going to run the projects, they're just waiting. So we do think that, in general, we're mixing down, which is consistent with what we saw at the end of last year.
Our next question comes from the line of Joe Ahlersmeyer with Deutsche Bank.
Congrats on the strong finish to the year here.
Thanks, Joe.
Thanks, Joe.
Yes. Maybe moving beyond '24, just thinking about the 2 parts of your North America business, the R&R business and the new construction side of things, could you talk about, I guess, your views today multiyear on which of these end markets provide more upside off of -- what you deliver in '24? And then if you could just also speak to how you feel your manufacturing base, your infrastructure on distribution is agile enough, I guess, to handle one outperforming the other?
Yes. So starting with the second question first, Joe. So I would say that we're definitely cleaning up our distribution model. And we're looking at that as we do assess our footprint and our cost to serve our key customers across all markets in North America. So we're making sure that we're balanced, not the current state, but to what we expect future state to be. And clearly, based on the light volume, there's been overcapacity in some of our sites in the market as well. So we have taken sites offline as we all know last year, and we're continuing to critically look at cost to serve model. And that is, I think, well balanced to an upswing in the market because we've been doing a lot of great homework there. On the other side, as we kind of roll forward and just look at a very high-level view, you asked North America, I'm going to just go up a level and say that we clearly expect macro headwinds in Europe to continue into next year. So clearly, the outlook in Europe is definitely weaker in the next couple of years than we would expect for North America. And North America clearly, as I said before, we're under built. We need the units, but there's also going to be a snapback of R&R activity as resales kick in when interest rates come down. So we do expect both levers to be moving in the right direction. And clearly, we're getting ourselves ready to be able to serve both of those models and make sure that our cost to serve is well balanced. And if we see an increase in volume in '25, as many people expect currently in North America, we should have some nice operating leverage that drops to the bottom line. We're focused on both pillars, traditional and retail because they're both very important to us. And we're making sure that our cost to serve and our on-time delivery and our quality is meeting customer expectations in both of those segments.
That's really helpful. And then, Julie, on the CapEx guide for this year, I understand the need to invest here. Could you help us maybe think about how long we might be running at this type of level if it's sort of the new stable state? Or if maybe next year, we see some productivity coming out of the CapEx budget?
Yes. I'd say, I think, clearly, we'd say in the past, JELD-WEN is underinvested in its capital for both growth and efficiency, which, again, has shown in the results we've delivered historically. So this year, we've obviously evaluated our pipeline. We're pretty bullish on the opportunities. We'll continue to reevaluate that, obviously, on an annual basis. But I would expect it to be higher than the past, call it, that 2% to 2.5%. And again, if it continues at 4%, I think TBD, but absolutely I'd expect it to be elevated over our historical levels for capital. The other thing I'll note is we mentioned in our materials and our outlook for this year that we've got around $100 million of nonrecurring cash expenses this year that I would say we do feel like are unique to this year, and that we'd expect that type of activity to go back to more normal levels beyond this year. And so I also wanted to highlight that from a cash flow perspective and investing in ourselves.
Yes. And Joe, I would just add that these 800-plus projects, we have high visibility in our system. We're sequencing. As long as we see opportunity to deliver IRRs 20% and above, we're investing in ourselves because I believe that is an outstanding return for our shareholders and the right way to deploy capital. And so I would expect that also next year, CapEx would be elevated from a historical run rate if it's the same as this year. We'll have a discussion as we see the portfolio, the maturity and what kind of investments we need to make, but we will be investing, and that will continue into next year on the capital side. Julie mentioned the onetime will be out, but we'll still be funding projects that are very attractive. And candidly, we just don't have the resource currently to push all of these through the pipeline at the same time. So we're making sure that we're not biting off more than we can chew.
Yes. Makes a lot of sense. I agree with the philosophy there.
Our next question comes from the line of Michael Rehaut with JPMorgan.
This is Andrew Azzi on for Mike. I just wanted to ask maybe on the new single-family construction side in North America, at least flat to up slightly. It looks potentially a little bit conservative as compared to maybe some of the larger homebuilders in terms of year-over-year percentage increase. And I'm just hoping maybe you can help me bridge that gap and maybe if there's some upside or conservatism baked in there?
Yes. Well, so there's still a high level of uncertainty. I would argue, in the market in general. Clearly, there are some key macro levers that are going to potentially soften in the back half of this year, which could potentially improve the reality. But don't forget, we're 3 to 6 months behind a start until our products are built in, first windows to button up the envelope and then doors later in the process. So it takes a while for this to trickle down. Second point is we potentially see these starts out there, but it's a lower end, and so we would actually like to see the higher end come back. So the custom -- and that's a pull-through for our wood windows and our premium products. And so clearly, there's some pretty good value appreciation when that market comes back. But clearly, it's way softer than the low end of the market. So we're -- I would say, I wouldn't call us overly cautious. I would just say that we're careful because there's just so many things that are influencing this market in the current state, and this is our view. If things are better, then I think we'll all be proud and happy to report that as the year goes on.
Understood. Yes, I think that definitely sounds appropriate. I guess I'm just curious on the price/cost neutral. Is that on a dollar basis or a margin basis?
Yes, it's really a dollar basis, which, I guess, drops through as really not having much impact on margins. And so yes, it's -- but when we say that, we're definitely talking about targeting a $1 neutral close to 0 impact on year-over-year changes in EBITDA.
And I would say, we've talked, Andrew, on prior calls, there's a couple of things. I mean, we still have a lot of work to do on cleaning up kind of the pricing foundation and making sure that we're doing a better job of being consistent, and that's still ongoing. But I'd say on a broader level, the input costs, we want to make sure that we can offset that with price, but nothing more than that.
Our next question comes from the line of Steven Ramsey with Thompson Research Group.
Maybe to hone in on North America repair and remodel activity. Can you talk to how much of your volume depends on existing home sales coming back? Or what other drivers on the North America R&R side are you looking for to get more confidence and clarity on where volumes could go?
I think that's -- Steven, I think that's the big lever. It's roughly 50% of our North American sales. And as we look at retail, there's a couple of things that are important in retail. I've said this before, you need to have the product there, especially if it's cash and carry. There's a couple of different elements that the retail partners are working on. So it's making sure you have the product there if the traffic is in the store. Second is, they're trying to do a better job of rebalancing inventories as we're coming out of a very tight inventory reality in the last couple of months. And I do see that some of our partners are doing a better job of making sure that there's availability in stores. And the second key lever for growth, and that's linked -- a lot of that's linked to resale. And with every resale, there's some R&R activity, and then there's another resale behind that. So there's still a number of things that are linked together when the resale market really starts to kick in. And I would argue that, that's driven by interest rate relief and people being able to get into mortgages that are closer to where they currently are. And I'd say the second pillar that we're really driving on R&R is a professional growth. And professional growth is one of those areas where if there's a big cash and carry market and a lot of the customers are already there, there are some products as well that our retail partners believe that, that will be a good opportunity for them to take some share on what they call the pro segment. So those are the 2 things. And pro is not distinctly linked to the new construction -- or the resale market.
Okay. That's great color. And then a follow-up on the CapEx range, $150 million to $200 million, somewhat wide range. I'm curious what you're looking for that would swing that to the low or the high end? How much of it is demand versus transformation progress, timing versus equipment delivered? Are there other factors to move CapEx up or down?
Yes. So it's -- number one, it's the ability of our organization to execute on those projects. That is the bottleneck currently. We feel great about the strength of the balance sheet and our ability to self-fund this transformation, which was one of the key things that we wanted to deliver. There are longer lead times for certain things. And obviously, that's going to also define timelines and our ability to spend and also to deliver and install certain lines of equipment. So I would say we're the bottleneck. I would be pleased if we could spend the upper end of the range. But I think that's going to be a challenge for our organization because we're coming from a very different reality.
Our next question comes from the line of Alex Rygiel with B. Riley.
Can you talk a little bit about industry -- can you talk a little bit about industry consolidation? And any opportunities or negative impacts that you could see from a more competitive environment?
Yes. So in general, we don't want to make comments about competitors. Clearly, we can talk about the competitive landscape. And our main focus is to execute on what we have in front of us to really improve our operating performance. So we're totally focused on doing that and delivering the appropriate returns, and that means cleaning up our supply chain. That means optimizing our footprint. That means driving growth initiatives. And if we execute on that, which I'm very confident that we will, that puts us in a great position in the market. I think maybe it's more challenging for the equity analyst environment, there's one less direct comp for us in the market. But we're focused on really ourselves and really delivering what we see we need to do, and have a pretty clear view on how we're going to do it and what we're investing to get there. So I think that would be my comment in general. We're very bullish on the market. It's gone through a tough time, and it will continue to be tough in Europe, but it's a great opportunity, and we're taking advantage of that to do our homework, clean ourselves up and really get ready for the rebound so we can come out pretty strong. So we feel well positioned, but still, we have a lot of work to do.
And then can you rank the gross margin on new construction versus R&R versus multifamily? And maybe talk a little bit about the headwind in weaker volume anticipated in multifamily as it relates to gross margin impact?
Yes. So Alex, we typically wouldn't share that kind of detail on profit pools across different channels. That's not the kind of detail that we provide.
Our final question comes from the line of Keith Hughes with Truist.
The question is on Europe. You've talked about identifying Europe for potentially some strategic actions, and we've got the announcement this morning around that plan. Is Europe in the structure you want it to be with the improvements you're going towards? Or could there be other potential changes that could come down on the continent?
Yes. So I would -- Keith, thanks for the question. We have stepped up the leadership quality in the European market with the hire of Gustavo, and we're really looking forward to actually accelerating the transformation plans that we have for Europe. We've said all along, we have strong brands and strong markets, but we have yet to deliver commensurate margins to really validate that case. So the ball is in our court to do that, and that's a challenge that we've accepted, and we want to deliver on. So we have a broad portfolio of projects to improve the profit levels in underperforming markets. And we have also high expectations of margin appreciation even in '24 with continued market headwinds. And I'd say they're a little behind the U.S. from a volume development standpoint. So it will be also a challenging '25, at least the start of '25. So we need to make sure that we're well prepared for that. So no other strategic implications for Europe outside of, "hey, we've got to fix the foundation in Europe and get ourself ready for the profitable growth, which will clearly arrive, it's just going to take a bit longer than in North America."
I would now like to turn the call over to James Armstrong for closing remarks.
Thank you for joining our call today. If you have any follow-up questions, please reach out, and I would be happy to answer. This ends our call today, and have a great day.
This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.